Who are the overrated intellectuals of the past century?

Friedman is the exact opposite of Keynes. Friedman believed in free markets. Keynes believed in government manipulation of the economy.. His theories were first tried in the 30's and failed. They have failed every time they are tried. The stimulus package and other Keynesian demand side "pump priming" has failed again. Keynes is by far the most overrated. But politician always think his theories will succeed this time because they are smarter this time and they will spend more money. When you ask Keynesians about the stimulus, they claim it failed because we didn't spend enough!

I've thought about this over the last couple of days. In America today, there are no overrated intellectuals.

Friedman is not the opposite of Keynes. You can't really have "opposites" in economics really. Maybe Marxism and pure free market capitalism. Keynesianism and Monetarism aren't the same by any stretch, but they aren't diametrically opposed.

Friedman was not a pure free market believer. He was one of the architects of withholding income for taxation. He advocated a government monopoly over credit. He believed in a lot of interventions in the market.

Why all the Ayn Rand haters? Which part of her intellectual brilliance doesn't "stand up to analysis"? Her philosophy of objectivism does not have any holes in it. As a matter of fact, taken to the extreme she took it, it is the only philosophy which eliminates the problems that "faith" (i.e. religion/do-good-isms) have caused in our society.

Amby Burfoot

Ayn Rand: Anyone with a theory that provides the same answer to every question shoulden't be taken seriously. I mean, come on. "Self-interest" can be used to rationalize almost anything.

Then there's the fact that her follwers revere her so dogmatically. She was an author! Her books were fiction. F-I-C-T-I-O-N!

Alan Greenspan: The "Great Recession" and the housing market. Period. Overrated theories and delusions about self-regulation led to overstated projections. This (of course) led to one giant ass crash. That he was affiliated with Rand doesn't help either.

Howard Zinn

Freud is a good pick. Even though psychiatry has mostly left him behind it is still largely quackery. In my youth homosexuality was listing in the official diagnostic manual as a disorder. Now, 35 years later, homophobia is listed. As I understand it, these things are decided by a vote of the psychiatric association.

I once had a consulting gig working for a psychitrist who was head of a dept at a top hospital. A few times I was in the room when docs were discussing medications. It was pretty much "let's toss darts & see what happens."

Check out this interesting piece on how the lobotomy came into being:

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/21/lobotomy.html

Talk about godawful!

My great fear is completely socialized medicine, wherein these scammers have full access to the levers of taxation and spending, not to mention regulation of our daily lives.

ayn rand's philosophy of selfishness is pretty darn overrated

Has to be Derrida - who else has destroyed the ability of students to enjoy literature? Who else has wrecked the spirit of storytelling that is a key element of being human?

Or Freud. But I think Freud will be back.

Anyone who wants to see how non-Keynesian economics worked out go to Europe and America in the 1930s. After the stock market crashed all of Europe and the US tried to cut all government intervention in economics, cutting government spending and trade in attempts to reduce debt. THIS FAILED, the cuts in spending left millions without a job and collapsed a failing market- Stresemann and Hoover Failed. Governments have to spend in times of depression, Keynes was the first to raise this idea. John Maynard Keynes method of counter-cyclical economics is the only proven way to solve depression.

He also advocated against the terms in the treaty of Versailles, if we listened to John Maynard Keynes there might of been a different Germany.

agip wrote:

Has to be Derrida - who else has destroyed the ability of students to enjoy literature? Who else has wrecked the spirit of storytelling that is a key element of being human?

Or Freud. But I think Freud will be back.

Why will Freud be back?

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What's the psychology of calling something or someone overrated? We seem to have some deep need for it. Wonder what Freud would have to say?

[quote]Mr.Price wrote:

Ayn Rand: Anyone with a theory that provides the same answer to every question shoulden't be taken seriously. I mean, come on. "Self-interest" can be used to rationalize almost anything.

Then there's the fact that her follwers revere her so dogmatically. She was an author! Her books were fiction. F-I-C-T-I-O-N!

You've obviously only heard of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Try The Virtue of Selfishness or her books of essays on Objectivism. Listen to her lectures and watch what little footage is out there and you'll learn something. Not trying to persuade you to her point of view, but just defending her status as someone who is definitely not in the over rated category.

You'd also need to be aware she was born in socialist Soviet Union and witnessed the cruelty and shared suffering socialism inevitably causes. Her fiction (which she wrote in English after not ever speaking it until she was 18 years old) was intended to raise awareness of the power of freedom of thought and action etc. As an intellectual, she holds her own.

This is very true. And if the balanced budget idiots have anything that resembles their desires occur, we are going to see what a non Keynes approach looks like by year end.

There is no sense trying to convince the masses who haven't read anything about Keynes and the 30's. But the mistake then was to let off the gas in the late 30's which caused a second collpase into the 40's. The second WW caused massive deficit spending and propelled us out of 15 years of problems that the great bubble had caused.

This is no time to balance the budget. We need more stimulus not less. That is unless you want 1800's style busniess booms and busts over and over again

Agreed. It seems like people here are focusing on the God Delusion and ignoring that he's been a fairly influential biologist over the past few decades. He does perhaps stick to his "gene selectionism" guns a bit too strongly, but I think saying he's overrated is a bit extreme.

I'm a Huxley fan but is there any doubt Tim Leary was vastly overrated, even if his advocacy of psychedelics as potential medicines has a great deal of merit. I mean, Nixon called him, "The Most Dangerous Man in America." What about Charles Manson?